TL;DR – Battlefield 4’s campaign is largely an improvement over the Battlefield 3 campaign and can be described as an alright FPS experience. The gunfights are less annoying, there are some interesting ideas with your ability to access all of the guns in the game, there are hidden collectibles that are actually pretty well hidden and it’s a big visual upgrade over the previous game. On the flip-side, your squad AI is much worse and it’s even shorter with only 7 missions. While looking at BF3 I kept saying it felt like a bad Call of Duty campaign, while here in BF4 it feels like an alright CoD campaign with the occasional section that’s a bit more open for exploration. Overall I’d recommend giving the Battlefield 4 campaign a play if you already own the game and would say it’s a decent enough to consider picking it up if you see it for very cheap.
Quick Note: My screenshots didn’t save for some reason, but that’s OK because this is a very short review.
Alright so I recently played through the BF3 campaign and found it to be pretty underwhelming and an FPS experience I couldn’t really recommend. As this blog is about me and my one-man-mission to rise up clear my games backlog, I also remembered I had Battlefield 4. So I decided to play through it while my memory of BF3 was still fresh. To my surprise, the Battlefield 4 campaign is actually decently entertaining and while it still can’t really compete with the better Call of Duty campaigns, it’s better than some of them! This might not sound like praise, but considering how much BF3 and especially Battlefield 4 have been trying to emulate the success of those CoD campaigns, it’s nice to see that DICE finally managed to make something that succeeds in this regard.
I’ll try to keep it concise, much like the campaign. Because Battlefield 4 has a grand total of 7 campaign missions – that’s it. In them we play as a silent protagonist muhreen who is fighting to save the world from a coup in China. The levels are fairly linear although you can sometimes find an empty vehicle or turret to use. The enemy variety is minimal, as you only fight enemy soldiers and the occasional enemy vehicle. There are a lot of bombastic quasi-cutscenes where things explode/collapse near/onto our protagonist. As for the gameplay it’s what you’d expect. You can carry two weapons (and two pieces of gear like mines or grenade launchers). Your health regenerates. The enemy is all over your ass 24/7 and there are a handful of opportunities to use vehicles and turrets. You always have a squadmate or squadmates with you, but generally they are absolutely useless unlike in BF3. I’m not sure why your squad is so useless now, but sadly they really are hopeless. It’s no wonder that you get chosen to be the new squad commander/overall badass. The enemy AI isn’t great, although they are freakishly good at using grenades. There are a couple of positive changes that Battlefield 4 has made to the single player formula though. So I’ll give them credit for the following.
First things first, there are now collectibles in each level and they are exceedingly well hidden. Nothing fancy, I think every CoD has done this since the Xbox 360 came out. Yet it’s something “new” that wasn’t in the previous game. More importantly, you now gain score just like in multiplayer for killing various enemies and the multiplayer score-streaks carry over. So multi-kills, headshots, “adrenaline kills” (ones that occur when you are near death) etc now give you bonus points. These points then unlock 3-tiers of medal for each mission. Each medal gains you access to new weapon unlocks, in the myriad gun-cases scattered around every single player level. This is another new idea and one I actually quite liked. Basically the way it works is that you can take any unlocked gun out of these gun cases. This lets you swap your load-out frequently, and lets you experiment with every gun in the game. They also reload your ammo, and as you can’t carry much at a time they are very useful. There are also equipment cases which do the same thing except for your gear. Unfortunately these always have an arbitrary restriction on what gear you can use. You can’t unlock the RPG by being swagtastic on the 3rd mission for example. You can also spot enemies with some cool binoculars, which lets you tell your squad to ENGAGE certain enemies. This is the big new gimmick, as it lets you tell your squad which enemies to focus on. In theory this would be pretty useful. In practice your squad sucks and they will barely even ENGAGE enemies you haven’t told them to. Seriously if I had a single great British pound for every time my squad failed to deal with the one enemy who flanked me – despite that enemy being right in front of them – I’d be able to buy every battlefield game.
Other than these new additions and tweaks, the campaign hasn’t changed too much. Fortunately the Quick-Time-Events are now totally gone (thank God). Plus as mentioned the visuals have been improved at least for the Xbone/PS4/PC versions of the game. The story is a bit weaker almost as if to compensate, with more of a focus on your squad’s characters. By which I mean, the character called Irish. Seriously he could be mistaken for the protagonist if he wasn’t absolutely useless at shooting people. Fortunately I don’t think anyone was too enraptured with the BF3 campaign narrative. Especially as this game basically shares nothing in common with the previous one. Well except for a single returning character who you only see for a total of one mission. In terms of smaller gameplay changes, your character does feel like they have more health so you can actually run-and-gun as the game expects you too, which is a welcome change. As for the soundtrack, it’s still fine if nothing particularly special. That’s about it honestly, as there isn’t much incentive to replay missions. While I could make snide comparisons between the prison level in Battlefield 4 and the gulag level in CoD: Black Ops I won’t bother.
In conclusion then, the Battlefield 4 campaign is better than the BF3 one. It’s nothing amazing, but there are some solid gunfights if you can look past the Michael Bay explosions. The narrative has some weirdly dark moments for a game that generally doesn’t take itself that seriously, but other than that it’s a standard 7th generation console shooter. You run around, you regenerate health, the AI is dumb, your squad is dumb and the action is constant. It’s not a bad experience by any means and the smaller tweaks add up to make a campaign that’s much better than the one in BF3.